coming back soon....
It's been awhile, hasn't it? I'm getting ready to come back with a re-vamped site. Just a little while longer...
Above: Mari emerging from Yayoi Kusama's "Red Pumpkin," Naoshima, Kagawa, Japan
jikatabi
Jikatabi — canvas split-toed, rubber-soled shoes — have traditionally been worn as work shoes, in construction or gardening, for example. This hand-sewn purple pair I got recently from SOU SOU are one of the more conservative designs. Check out the exuberant patterns and wonderfully odd jikatabi sneakers at SOU SOU's net store and in this article at PingMag.
kudaka island, okinawa
More photos from our trip to Okinawa in this gallery (requires Flash).
ohara
A thunderstorm rumbles in the hills over Sakyo-ku as Mari, my brother Andrew, my nephew and I wait by the Takano river for the bus that will take us to Ohara.
Walking along a quiet path next to rice fields and gardens to our hot spring ryokan in Ohara.
junsei restaurant
Looking for vegetarian options for my visiting brother and nephew, Mari found Junsei near Nanzenji, where we had an excellent yuba (tofu skin) kaiseki dinner. The garden, lotuses and koi were as beautiful as the food.
sanmon gate at nanzenji
A great thing about having guests is seeing the Kyoto sights with them. When my brother Andrew and his son visited last week, I saw the upper floor of Sanmon gate at Nanzenji for the first time. The gate was built in 1628. In all the years since then, how many people have hit their head on that beam?
day at the pool
I don't remember my past summers in Kyoto being as hot as this one. While the neighbors suck up electricity to refrigerate their apartments, we leave the air conditioning off at our house, taking maybe too much pride in our environmentally conscious suffering. Shouldn't we feel the seasons?
Still, one can only bear so much. A couple weeks back we found relief from the heat at a pool party with friends at Nenrinbou hotel in Takagamine.
Tattoos — and by extension, Yakuza — are not allowed.
ume
These ume, a type of apricot, had a wonderful light, fruity fragrance. The delicious smell was deceptive, though, because ume are too sour to eat raw. Mari boiled some of these and added sugar to get a tangy juice and jam. Others are now sitting at the bottom of a ceramic-coated bucket, weighted down and pickling in salt. After we add purple shiso (perilla) leaves and wait a few months, the ume will have transformed into soft, red, wrinkly, salty-sour umeboshi.
fiber!
A few months back, a friendly, slightly high-strung man from NTT, the phone company, came to our door offering installation of a hikari fiber-optic line. Supported by subsidies from the Japanese government, he explained, NTT could install the new super-fast Internet connection for free, and the monthly cost would be discounted for one-year. Hikari fiber offers a "best effort" speed, he said, of 100 Mbps. A more realistic speed, he admitted, might range from 30 to 50 Mbps. My DSL line, in comparison, was getting about 3 to 5 Mbps. Was the DSL fast enough for web browsing, designing websites, downloading multi-gigabyte episodes of "Lost?" Well, yeah.... but to have 10 to 33 times faster at the same price? Okay! I couldn't resist the pressure to keep up. Is this not Japan, where, at least according to internet lore, we live in the future? We arranged the installation.
A month and a half later, an NTT technician in white hardhat and blue jumpsuit arrived to make the hook up. Installation was quick enough. The configuration was more confusing... but by the end of the day everything was basically online.
So, is it fast? My tests at speedtest.net typically show between 15 to 25 Mbps downstream and 4 to 10 Mbps upstream. Nowhere near "best effort" speed, but certainly faster than my old connection. Big downloads, like movie trailers, software updates, music — nice and quick. Daily web-surfing, though, doesn't feel much different than before. Haven't tried torrents much yet, but I've heard that my ISP likes to limit P2P traffic.
Notes:
- My ISP, Plala, had several "security" filters turned on by default. The filters can restrict such things as Skype and torrents. Finding out where to turn off the filters was a little tricky. And are there other filters that they don't tell us about?
- Connecting to U.S. websites (basically all those that I visit) actually got slower at first, until i realized I needed to enter the DNS server addresses recommended by Plala into my system's control panel.
- I used to point a domain name to the web server on my home computer using a dynamic DNS service. This doesn't work anymore, apparently blocked by Plala or the router they provided.
koujitsu-kyo contemplation
Koujitsu-kyo (好日居) is a café that opened recently near Heian shrine. Built in what used to be an old home, it's a casually elegant space with a European-inflected traditional Japanese woody style. (My description is not so good... I'll try to go back to take better pictures.) The owner, who worked as an architect before she quit her job to open the café, renovated the building herself. We sat in the soft light next to the garden doors in the back and snacked on red bean mochi, matcha, cookies and fragrant Chinese teas. Everything was delicious, enhanced by the peaceful atmosphere of the place and by the owner's obvious bliss in sharing it with us. Koujitsu-kyo is a short walk from Kyoto's National Museum of Modern Art, near the boutiques across the river and down the street.
The table centerpiece in the photo above is part of an exhibit of the café owner's grandma's delightfully strange and cute collection of kewpie dolls, each of which the grandma embellished with tiny hand-knitted outfits and accessories.
ゴジラ！
One night in Tokyo last May, Mari and I turned a corner in Hibiya and ran into a familiar face.
